Lawyers made their closing arguments Thursday in the military pretrial hearing for accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, which will determine whether he should face a court-martial for allegedly leaking classified video and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. "[The defense] suggested that the original classification authorities for this classified information that Bradley Manning is accused of releasing actually take the stand and be...

Alleged U.S. Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning is scheduled to make his first court appearance today after being held for more more than a year and a half by the U.S. military. Manning is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of classified U.S. documents in history. We’re joined by perhaps the nation’s most famous...

In "We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People," State Department official Peter Van Buren provides a first-hand account of the faltering and often misguided attempts at reconstruction in Iraq undertaken by the U.S. government. Van Buren published the book after rebuffing heavy State Department pressure to redact a number of passages. Van Buren joins us to discuss the failed efforts he...

Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, the former chief oversight official of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, has reached a $970,000 settlement six years after she was demoted for publicly criticizing a multi-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton—the company formerly headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Greenhouse had accused the Pentagon of unfairly awarding the contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown &...

On the eve of the extradition hearing for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange in London, we spend an exclusive hour with David House, who co-founded the Bradley Manning Support Network after U.S. Army Private Manning was arrested for allegedly releasing classified U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks. House refused to testify last month in Alexandria, Virginia, before a grand jury hearing on WikiLeaks and the disclosure of thousands of...

National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake faces 35 years in prison on espionage charges for alleged unauthorized “willful retention” of five classified documents. “Espionage is the last thing my whistleblowing and First Amendment activities and actions were all about,” Drake said recently in a public speech. "This has become the specter of a truly Orwellian world where whistleblowing has become espionage." According to The...

Military officials have announced alleged whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, who is suspected of leaking classified U.S. documents to WikiLeaks, has been cleared to be held as a medium-security prisoner at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was just transferred. Up until last week, Manning was held in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. His treatment at Quantico was condemned by Amnesty...

In a national broadcast exclusive, we speak with Thomas Tamm, the former U.S. Justice Department attorney who helped expose the Bush administration’s domestic warrantless eavesdropping program that intercepted private email messages and phone calls of U.S. residents without a court warrant. On Tuesday, news broke that the Justice Department dropped its long-running criminal investigation of Tamm. The relatively quiet end to the...

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have virtually disappeared from mainstream media coverage, Democracy Now!’s Juan Gonzalez has a wide-ranging conversation with Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader about the ongoing U.S. military occupation of these countries, the treatment of WikiLeaks accused whistleblower Bradley Manning, and how this connects to the attack on worker rights in Wisconsin...